Etosha and big animals.

This may have been our last trip to Etosha on this visit. We leave for Windhoek in less than one week and then we leave for Chicago one week after that! Therefore, we have less than two weeks left in Namibia. Crazy!
Immediately after entering the park, René made this comment: "I think we are going to see some things we've never seen in Etosha before." And he was right!! René spotted this little moving dot (see picture below) about 10 minutes after we entered the park.

This little moving dot was an elephant! If you remember we did see elephants (a large herd) near Palmwag on our trip. But those were desert adapted elephants. We had not yet had the chance to see elephants in Etosha. In the rainy season, evidently all the elephants migrate to the northern reaches of the park (where there aren't any roads). Well... the elephants are back!!

At this point I said "Oh no, he's coming straight towards us."Luckily he turned toward this truck and crossed the road right in front of us! So cool!

We also saw this endangered black rhino (that I posted picture of on the previous post).
He was an amazing animal and we just sat and watched him for an hour. He was kind of bumbling along, just minding his own business.
These people were dumb and continually tried to get closer and closer to this poor rhino. Finally he saw them (I guess rhinos have notoriously bad eyesight) and he freaked out and ran the other way. We heard stories of rhinos flipping ambulances, so we weren't about to creep up on him like this. René and I are also big fans of observing wildlife instead of trying to disrupt wild animals in their homes.
Luckily, when he plopped down here the annoying people in the car had driven away. We were able to watch him for a long time with out anyone disturbing his mid-day rest.

This is how giraffes drink from the waterhole. They have to open their front legs and bend way down. Then the water has to go all the way down/up (depending on how you look at it) their neck to their bellies. It is neat to watch.
In addition to the return of the elephants, the herds have returned. We saw a herd of at least 300 zebra and even more springbok. It was nuts! They were in the road, by the road, on the landing strip, and everywhere you looked!